Rethinking Extinction: Toward a less gloomy environmentalism

In this essay, which appeared in Harper’s Magazine, James K. Boyce examines the history of the carrier pigeon through the lens of understanding the American environmental movement.

“A recurrent theme in the narratives of American environmentalism is that people are bad. Humans, in this telling, are sinners, a cancerous growth on the face of the planet. The traditional goal of the environmental movement has been to restore a baseline, a state of nature that existed before human defilement. But however well these people-versus-nature narratives served environmentalism over the past century, the time has come to dismantle them and erect a new intellectual scaffolding.”